You can achieve seamless failover in RabbitMQ by running a clustered rabbitmq node on each of your clients, and configure the client to connect to its local rabbitmq. The cluster will take care of routing the messages to the active mirrored queue. (Note that on the consumer side your code must still properly handle consumer cancel notifications, but that's not too much to ask.)
This is architecturally similar to the mongodb/mongos solution described in the article.
Fascinating. Here is a video showing the wasps collecting the pollen inside a male fig flower (as described in the first paragraph): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZCYoEdavDk
We also have had good luck using Acrobat Connect for screen sharing between 3-8 parties. It was a unstable on Mac a couple years ago, but they seem to have ironed those problems out.
From the release notes: "This framework is only supported by Apple on Mac computers equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M graphics chips."
Unfortunately my three year old MBP is too old :( If someone with a newer Mac wants to report back on how well this works, here is a good test video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N2YWRJ-ppo
We've been using Bacula: weekly fulls and daily incrementals to disk, and weekly fulls to tape for offsite storage. As our data size grows, tapes are going to run out of steam. I've recently began experimenting with http://www.nongnu.org/duplicity to do encrypted backups to S3. So far it has been working great.
This is architecturally similar to the mongodb/mongos solution described in the article.